HPC Wire (04/17/14) Tiffany TraderUniversity of Wisconsin professor Mark Hill is working to make computers more efficient by finding hidden efficiencies in their architecture, an increasingly necessary focus for computer engineers as Moore's law approaches its practical limits. The performance of computer tasks is one area of concentration, and Hill times such tasks to determine overall speed and the duration of each individual step. He was successfully able to use paging selectively through utilization of a simpler address translation method for certain components of important applications. Cache misses were thus reduced to less than 1 percent, and such a solution would enable a user to do more with the same framework, shrinking their server requirements and saving money. "A small change to the operating system and hardware can bring big benefits," Hill observes. He advocates a more unified approach, and he believes the slowdown in Moore's law can be countered by sufficient numbers of hidden inefficiencies. "I think we're going to wring out a lot of inefficiencies and still get gains," Hill says. "They're not going to be like the large ones that you've seen before, but I hope that they're sufficient that we can still enable new creations, which is really what this is about."Full Article

Mashable, April 12 For those looking to land a job at a hot tech startup or a coveted spot with an established technology company, the job search scene has an up-and-coming competitor to the traditional career fair: hackathons. With that in mind, Readyforce, a career network for college students, aims to hone in on hackathons as an outlet for job seekers. The platform streamlines the process of connecting students with companies and organizations recruiting those with computer science and computer engineering backgrounds. Readyforce's new platform, HackerHub, launched this spring as a one-stop shop for student leaders and companies with post-grad opportunities. Hackathons are ideal hunting grounds for companies looking to land top talent straight out of school. They are often more appealing than a traditional career fair, as companies can send their engineers to an event and get a first-hand glimpse at potential candidates and their skills. Students in the upper echelons of computer science or engineering fields are often highly sought after. These are the doers, the students doing things outside of the classroom -- they're taking the initiative to start their own projects. They're the kind of students you can hire who, in some cases, are as experienced as an engineer who has years of experience. Companies seeking to hire such talent may want to consider hackathons as a way of making an impression on these candidates, and determining which students are the best fit for their companies. Full Article